Small Prophets review – Mackenzie Crook’s superb Detectorists follow-up brings surrealism to the suburbs

Crook develops a whole new genre – magical social realism – in this strange and wonderful comedy

Trust Mackenzie Crook to do it again. Since his BBC curio Detectorists concluded in 2017 (the 2022 Christmas special notwithstanding), it has achieved cult-like status: a comedy that excavated the profound from the prosaic, transforming muddy fields and failed treasure hunts into something more. Crook’s deft writing made his tale of two men and their metal detectors less a satire about hobbyists than a meditation on male friendship, thwarted dreams, and the quiet devastations of middle age. Expectations are high, then, for Small Prophets.

It doesn’t disappoint. Just as Detectorists found poetry in the Suffolk landscape and church halls, so Small Prophets discovers it in retail parks and overgrown suburban gardens – that same mournful melancholy punctured by moments of brilliant, absurdist humour. Even the music, haunting and ethereal, will twang its way into your soul.

Pearce Quigley stars as Michael Sleep, whose life has been an inconvenience from the moment his partner Clea vanished seven years ago. His house remains a shrine to her absence, his front garden a wilderness that appals his neighbour Clive (Big Boys’ Jon Pointing), a man who considers sparrows and bees a pestilence. By day, Michael works at a DIY superstore, where he delights in dispensing wrong advice to customers while conspiring with young colleague Kacey (Lauren Patel) to torment his jobsworth manager Gordon (Crook).

It sets up as a lo-fi workplace sadcom, but then Crook pulls the rug: Michael’s father Brian (Michael Palin), residing in a care home where dementia eats away at him, claims to know the secret of making homunculi – tiny prophetic beings who live in glass jars and can tell the future (or what happened to Clea). All of a sudden it shifts from kitchen-sink comedy into folklore and the supernatural.

Recipe for success: Pearce Quigley stars as oddball Michael Sleep in ‘Small Prophets’ (BBC)

For it to work, the performances are key. Patel brings spark as Kacey, while Palin is wonderful as Brian, an eccentric whose grip on reality may be slipping but whose belief in alchemy (and mischief) remains absolute. Grounding the whole thing is Quigley, his performance as the oddball Michael shuffling between mordant and moving, his face all hangdog expressions and shaggy sorrow. The scenes between Quigley and Palin, especially, are poignant without ever becoming cloying.

If the show’s magical realism gives you pause, don’t be put off: you’ll be rewarded with something funny, strange, and surprisingly accessible. Like Detectorists before it, this is a series that wrings emotion from the commonplace and everyday – only this time, the treasure Crook has buried is altogether more peculiar. Small Prophets brings large returns.